Walter Hill famously bristled at his film Southern Comfort being referred to as a Vietnam allegory; such denial has had him labeled as inexplicably stubborn, as he’s even quoted as conceding that the 1981 film could withstand and even encourage such a reading. But…
Episode Description: This week, prepare yourself for a super-sized episode as we discuss Tom Green’s divisive 2001 comedy Freddy Got Fingered. Marvel as two grown men spend over two hours discussing the merits of a film in which an elephant is brought to climax…
Episode Description: This week, nuclear war meets teen comedy as we take on 1986’s ill-conceived The Manhattan Project, directed by Marshall Brickman. Christopher Collet stars as a high school genius who steals some plutonium from John Lithgow and uses it to create an atomic…
The summer of 1996 saw the release of three huge blockbusters that would in one way or another influence the next 20 odd years of Hollywood filmmaking. Twister revived the moribund eco-disaster picture, while Mission: Impossible gave global superstar Tom Cruise his very own (ongoing) action franchise. The…
…Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of…
Though he didn’t invent it, James Mangold so perfected the Hollywood biopic/true story template with Walk the Line that they made a beat-for-beat parody of it in Walk Hard, so he might as well have. In Ford v Ferrari, he aims that factory efficiency…
Another in a long line of action comedies made by people who can’t shoot action, Michael Dowse’s Stuber is frequently funny and buoyed by two capable leads, but it fails to toy with the tropes in the buddy film sandbox, and is not particularly…
“This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity,” concludes Dave Kehr’s negative Chicago Reader review of All That Jazz, Bob Fosse’s penultimate directorial feature. And it certainly is — that’s what makes it so glorious.…
After celebrated prestige pictures like Shame and 12 Years a Slave, you’d be forgiven for expecting something less disreputable from Steve McQueen than Widows. But McQueen’s normal tendencies toward making “important” work (not to mention his gorgeous, tactile images) add essential texture to what’s basically a rambunctious…
The stripped-down premise and formal exactitude of John McTiernan’s 1987 Predator are precisely not present in Shane Black’s The Predator, the latest attempt to drag-out and elaborate on a franchise that shouldn’t be burdened by much more than ‘scary monster kills people.’ This new installment collapses under the weight…
